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Interest surges in Apache's 200+ software projects, accelerating development and participation by 100% in four years

Earlier this month, The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) surpassed its two millionth revision milestone with a commit by ASF Member* Daniel Kulp on behalf of the Apache CXF Project:

> committer Daniel Kulp <dkulp@apache.org>

> Mon, 14 Jul 2014 21:38:23 +0000 (17:38 -0400)

> commit bf8fea668d23a2fc1bde471fad763ba63e112f11

> Fix test failure

Just four years ago, the ASF reached the 1M commit mark. Since then, Apache repositories changed greatly with the introduction of Git to the source code management system. The original Subversion (SVN) repository has been decentralized and augmented with 268 Git repositories, in addition to a robust GitHub presence with 564 different repositories.

"In the 15 years of the ASF's history Infrastructure has moved from one machine sitting under a desk, to a multi-datacenter, multi-cloud deployment on multiple continents that serves the 200-plus projects that call the ASF home," added Nalley.

Since 1999, the all-volunteer ASF has been developing and shepherding over two hundred leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server —the world's most popular Web server software— and dozens of industry-defining technologies and tools such as Apache Accumulo, Apache Cassandra, Apache CloudStack, Apache CouchDB, Apache Flex, Apache Hadoop, Apache Lucene/Solr, Apache Open Climate Workbench, Apache ServiceMix, Apache SpamAssassin, Apache Tomcat, and many others. In addition to Apache Top-level Projects (and sub-projects), there are currently 33 "podlings" undergoing development in the Apache Incubator, and 38 technical initiatives in the Apache Labs.

"Project commits is a useful measure of community health," said James Governor, Analyst and Founder at RedMonk. "Apache's continued relevance is demonstrated by a doubling of project commits in the last 4 years, after taking 10 years to reach its first 1M."

The ASF's more than 450 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo, taking place 17-21 November 2014 in Budapest, Hungary.

As a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, The ASF's day-to-day operating expenses are offset by individual donors and corporate sponsors including Budget Direct, Citrix, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, Pivotal, Produban, WANdisco, and Yahoo. The ASF's current server hosting and bandwidth is provided by Oregon State University Open Source Lab in the United States, and by SURFnet and Freie Universität Berlin (FUB) in Europe. In addition, substantial cloud credits have been donated by Microsoft and Rackspace.

*NOTE TO EDITORS -- About Apache Members and Committers: in 1999, the ASF incorporated with an inaugural membership of 21 individuals who oversaw the progress of the Apache HTTP Server. Additions to this core group grew with developers who contributed code, patches, or documentation. Some of these contributors were subsequently granted "Committer" status by the Membership [1], granting access to: commit (write) directly to the code repository, vote on community-related decisions, and propose an active user for Committership. Those Committers [2] that demonstrate merit in the Foundation's growth, evolution, and progress are nominated for ASF Membership by existing members. The meritocratic "Contributor-Committer-Member" approach is the central governing process [3] across the Apache ecosystem.

But how many of those projects are actually active? I mean pushes out releases on a regular basis.
How many of those "users"/"committers" are actually active? The typical Apache project has a large number of committers and 2 or 3 do any work and the rest are simple bystanders doing nothing